The core concept, “aliens versus vikings” promises all kinds of extravagantly cheesy fun. Unfortunately, Outlander isn’t all that much fun, largely because it isn’t cheesy. It is, in fact, a motion picture in which the idea of a humanoid alien crash-landing on earth in Norway in 799 A.D. to fight the giant lizard-like beastie that […]
Inkheart isn’t ultimately a good movie, but it comes much closer than any Brendan Fraser starring vehicle should be able to. Indeed, for a solid thirty minutes, it’s a much more than serviceable family-friendly adventure fantasy, and it’s only once the plot starts to tie itself in knots trying to avoid ending ahead of time […]
It’s hard to say whether Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is more terrible or inessential. Of course, that’s something of a false dichotomy – part of the reason it’s terrible is because it’s so very inessential. Set many hundreds of years prior to the unlikely, undeserving hit movies Underworld and Underworld: Evolution, Rise of the […]
It can be fairly said that Howard Hawks’s ripped-from-real-life adventure story Only Angels Have Wings is one of the most influential films in history, although I haven’t personally encountered that argument before. Here’s what the logic looks like: it was the first Hawks film to really make a splash in France – not the first […]
I just don’t know about the 3-D remake of My Bloody Valentine. It is extremely trashy, and it knows it – which is good. It is one of the only slasher movies in well over a decade that isn’t mired in self-parody – which is also good. It is dedicated to the idea that over-the-top […]
Name-drop a fella enough, and you start to feel guilty about it. Or in other words, the time has come, the Walrus said, to review a classic Dario Argento film already. Our volunteer is Deep Red, 1975 giallo that was one of the director’s finest works in genre that made his name. It comes in […]
Apparently, January is now the dumping ground, not only for the worst of the worst horror films and Happy Madison productions, but for enormously retrograde comedies about how every girl in the world wants so very much to have a big fancy wedding. Last year: 27 Dresses. This year: Bride Wars, a paean to friendship […]
I walked inside from one of the most idiotically cold days of the Chicago winter to see a movie whose first shot is of Chicago draped in snow. This I took to be a poor omen for things to come, and lo! I was correct. The Unborn is a colossal failure, the worst film yet […]
Street Angel was Frank Borzage’s 1928 follow-up to his masterful 7th Heaven; but it honestly feels much more like his follow-up to F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise. The earlier films were of course produced concurrently, and while 7th Heaven has some distinct sympathies with Murnau’s style, it’s got nothing on Street Angel, which was produced after Sunrise […]
If the 2007 Brazilian cops-and-druglords flick Elite Squad got any kind of U.S. release, I completely missed it. But if it didn’t, I imagine it’s not going to, at least not to judge from the Region 1 DVD that got released in October, something I learned completely by accident a little while ago. Maybe it’s […]
A review by request for reader Laurence C. from Canada. Admittedly, I’m stretching the definition of “classic” in this case beyond the beyond; even beyond the definition of “classic trash” that I’m indulging myself in for a few weeks. We’re talking about a film that came out in the summer of 2007, when this blog […]
The five films that Frank Borzage directed after 1925’s Lazybones are either lost or otherwise unavailable, meaning that the modern viewer loses a bit of context for the jump from that film to 7th Heaven in 1927; and what a hell of a jump it was. Lazybones, which you may recall as the established director’s […]
